With hair gelled to spikes and skin still pink from blade and Lynx, the Sidcup boys in their crisp white Saturday shirts all look vaguely like friends of Frank Lampard.
Oblivious to lunchtime crowds, he strides towards Holborn Circus – sharp suit flashing in the Hatton Garden windows, mobile clenched tight – shouting: “You’re the one who told me you loved me…”
In the tombless gloom of bombed St Mary’s churchyard, between the Elephant and the looming shell of a dead hotel, he carefully unfolds a music stand, and uncases his trombone.
“Is this London?” she pouts, pressing a chocolatey face to the tagged and leaking window as their train waits at Worcester Park. “Daddy, when is it going to be London?”
On the 17:10 to Crayford, she suddenly remembers Stockholm, and how he’d smiled when asking her name; and how she’d said “Madeleine”, because she’d known he’d never know it wasn’t.
As the one o’clock mums race their prams round Wandsworth Park, Louise suddenly falters, breathless, and – staring down at Archie’s gurgling face – thinks bleakly of sports days to come.
Again he thuds into Percy Ingle’s window; she sighs, scoops him up, tosses him back into Lewisham High Street, and tidies the London cheesecakes; tiny pigeon footsteps dent coconut strands.
“Do I look like someone who needs a sorbet-maker?” he dolefully asks the bleary-eyed flotsam piled up on the N3’s stairs as birthday gifts are passed between strangers for appraisal.
“Did you know they found a mammoth under there?” She nodded across at the derelict Drummond Street entrance to Euston station I was trying to photograph. “A dead one, obviously.”
“I’ve heard there’s a new park here, where is it?” demanded the man in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park information centre in the middle of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.